I examined the issue in depth on Sept 7th “It is Beyond Time to Define Victory in Afghanistan”
http://www.ianlivingston.com/index.php/2009/09/…

P.S., Biddle is with CFR I belive.

How do we get talked into this misadventures? It's the mythology! Notice that none of the esteemed mongers of ever more war mention a proposal that must exist by logical necessity: leaving. Nope, we invested our big fat pride in it, can't now admit it's another horribly bad idea done even more horribly badly, brought to us by the same people, and the same “kinetic force uber alles” thinking, that brought us the Korean “conflict,” the Vietnam war, and every stupid misapplication of Newton's laws to human problems (aka gunboat diplomacy etc.) we've perpetrated since the end of WWII.

It's the same thing every conquering empire suffers: pseudo-divine egomaniacs with too much raw power for any human psyche to handle without thinking themselves gods among mere mortals at best, but mostly creatures and/or machines, end up running the whole thing into the ground for their own stupid lust and greed.

We've been sold on the myth of American exceptionalism, but there's no exemption to the laws of karma. Our gear-headed leaders have made the worst mistakes leaders can make, and there's going to be still more hell to pay just for actions committed.

Perverting the powers of myth: of revelation and obscuration; as any caveman could tell you, is just bad juju. Let's not kid ourselves: life as holy war powered by runaway mechanism may have already doomed life as we know it at its best (present circumstances show us in extremis, not in a typical posture) in the form of global climate disruption.

And these war-mongering maniacs think tweaking the settings on the great American war-machine, built for destruction, is going to transform it into a nation-building force? Can we nuke 'em to the space or computer age? Nope, nuking countries, and invading and occupying, is only good for sending them back the stone age, in which servile posture they'll be so much easier to control.

The cosmos is not a mechanism; society is not a perpetual motion holy war cash machine; our leaders are not semi-divine agents on earth of the tyrant-creator of the cosmos; in sum, wake up, people, we're getting jacked into more war in Afghanistan, just like we did into Iraq, not with kinetic weapons, but by the power of myths of American supremacy as the way the world must work or we all die.
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Crusading in the Arc of Instability
Tom Engelhardt
EXCERPT: In the end, as American troops are put into small, neighborhood, fortified living quarters and plunged into “exactly the sort of tough urban fight that war planners strove to avoid during the spring 2003 invasion of the country,” the Bush “surge” is likely to mean even more damage to the Iraqi capital, home to perhaps one-quarter of the country's population. And that is likely to be just the beginning. The President is ensuring further Iraqi and American dead and wounded, the destruction of much property, and the inflaming of passions of every sort. It's a formula for catastrophe and — with the possible exception of the President, the Vice-President, and a dwindling number of hangers-on — the truth is that everyone in Washington, in the world, knows it.

What is being planned by the Bush administration for Baghdad might end up proving nothing short of barbaric. From the first American “thunder runs” of tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles through the capital in early April 2003 and the “stuff happens” wholesale looting that followed to the present moment, the city has suffered no worse fate since the Mongols sacked it in 1268.

It's worth remembering in this context that, when the original Crusaders arrived in the Middle East, they weren't what undoubtedly comes into the Presidential brain on the subject. They weren't knights in shining armor. They weren't so many Errol Flynns. The European knights of the actual crusades came from a world that was still a barbarian outland, a coarse periphery of the Eurasian continent, while the Arab world was the homeland of a genuine high civilization.

When the crusaders first arrived amid their slaughter of Arabs (and of Jews), as the remarkable Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf reminds us in his history, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, they were looked on with horror by local Arab populations. They were feared as barbarians, as mass murderers, quite literally as cannibals. The chronicler Usamah Ibn Munqidh, would, for instance, write: “All those who were well-informed about the [crusaders] saw them as beasts, superior in courage and fighting ardour but in nothing else, just as animals are superior in strength and aggression.”

“This unkind assessment,” adds Maalouf, “accurately reflects the impression made by the [crusaders] upon their arrival in Syria: they aroused a mixture of fear and contempt, quite understandable on the part of an Arab nation which, while far superior in culture, had lost all combative spirit.”

Americans, despite heavy competition, now look like the new barbarians of the arc of instability — and things are going to get worse. Don't think the calling of air power into downtown Baghdad is likely to be forgotten. This is the behavior of barbarians, no less so than the use of suicide bombs in Baghdad's streets.

The Church of Our Man of Global Domination

So think of this as Bush's crusading scorecard for the years 2001-2007 — this record of barbarism with its guarantee of a “whirlwind of blowback,” as Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times puts it, and the unmistakable look of a war against Islam.

In truth, the most obvious factor linking all of the above together, however, the real thing they have in common, is not, in the normal sense, religious at all. If there is a religious war going on, waged by men (and a few women) of faith, then that faith is neither Christianity, nor Judaism, nor is the war against Islam per se. It comes instead from the fundamentalist Church of Our Man of Global Domination and at its heart is the monotheistic religion of Force. If the arc of instability were inhabited by recalcitrant, angry, sometimes armed, and sometimes destructive Buddhists, sitting on vast energy reserves, this war would look like a war against the Buddha himself.

The essential doctrine of faith that ties all the disparate foreign-policy acts of this administration together is the belief that to every global problem, to every difficult situation, there is but a single striking and uniform response — not the application of democracy, but the application of force.

In its pursuit of force as a faith, the Bush administration has managed to lower the bar on all applications of force by any state (just as it has raised the value of a nuclear arsenal and so, despite its threats of war, lowered the bar on the proliferation of those weapons). This is but a small part of the price a regime of force must pay when force is such an inadequate instrument in our world. The single most striking aspect of Bush foreign policy is that, over and over, it is revealed to be a quiver with but a single arrow in it. If things are going well, you reach back, take that arrow of force, or the threat of it, and notch it into your bow. If things are going badly, you do the same. For an administration so focused on the domination of planetary resources, its officials have, in fact, proven themselves remarkably resourceless.

The sort of eternal global military domination imagined in the National Security Strategy document they issued with great fanfare in 2002 is, of course, long gone. The sort of domination in Iraq and other lands in the arc of instability of which the neocons dreamed so fervently is no longer at issue either.

The religion of Force has proven itself a remarkably weak reed in our complex and difficult world, but that doesn't matter to them. Like many cultists, deeply imbued with their own way of looking at life, our President, our Vice President, and their dwindling band of compatriots can still imagine no other solutions than force, whatever the presenting problems. Not only can't they think outside the box, but the box itself is narrowing around this Presidency and Vice Presidency — and believe me, given their crusading record, that's dangerous indeed.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/158512/crusadin…
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US's 'arc of instability' just got bigger
Pepe Escobar
EXCERPT: The New Great Game is not only focused on the face-off between the United States and strategic competitors Russia and China – with Pipelineistan as a defining element.

The full spectrum dominance doctrine requires the control of the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” from the Horn of Africa to western China. The cover story is the former “global war on terror”, now “overseas contingency operations” under the management of President Barack Obama's administration.

Most of all, the underlying logic remains divide and rule. As for the divide, Beijing would call it, without a trace of irony, “splittist”. Split up Iraq – blocking China's access to Iraqi oil. Split up Pakistan – with an independent Balochistan preventing China from
accessing the strategic port of Gwadar there. Split up Afghanistan – with an independent Pashtunistan allowing the building of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline bypassing Russia. Split up Iran – by financing subversion in Khuzestan and Sistan-Balochistan. And why not split up Bolivia (as was attempted last year) to the benefit of US energy giants. Call it the (splitting) Kosovo model.

Kosovo, incidentally, is known as the Colombia of the Balkans. What Washington calls the “Western hemisphere” is a sub-section of the New Great Game. The linkage between the recent military coup in Honduras, the return of the living dead – that is, the resurrection of the US Navy's Fourth Fleet in July 2008 – and now the turbo-charging of seven US military bases in Colombia is not to be blamed merely on continuity from president George W Bush to Obama. Not really. This is all about the internal logic of Full Spectrum Dominance.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KI03Df0…
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I notice that none of the erudite proposals mention the obvious: it's the mythology of dominance: unquestionable faith in our ability to machine the world into subjugation, damn it!